


When the morning breathes

by haruun



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, M/M, word experiment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25729276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haruun/pseuds/haruun
Summary: If this isn't love, then everyone else is wrong. And he does, love him. It's just that Oikawa has to walk away, is all.Is it leaving someone when they left you first?[A long word experiment, the sort that hits you in the dead of night, half asleep. This was written in a blur several years ago, but it's worth uploading, even for archival purposes.]
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Kudos: 7





	When the morning breathes

The room is hushed in the fading night, and even with the slow whirring of the air conditioner, Hajime’s soft breaths are audible still, rising and falling against the fabric of his pillow.

Oikawa pulls himself up from the bed, taking care not to let the rustle of sheets interrupt the man beside him. The early morning air brushes a lot colder than he had borne with bare toes underneath the heavy duvet, and his shoulders tremble once before the light dusting of hair stands on end.

His shirt slips down one shoulder, careless, lightweight and a flutter against warm skin. The fabric is white, but in the last glimmers of moonlight Oikawa is stark even against it, glowing in the dying embers of an ancient star.

Oikawa blinks away the stickiness in his eyes and imagines a warm body sloping down his back. A firm, rising chest and arms wrapped with veins and bruises, tucking against his sides and rubbing mindless fingers into the dips of his limbs. The brush of a familiar mouth against his collarbone; the scent of morning breath humid against his cheek and the deep, earthy sound of Hajime’s worn out voice.

_ Tooru _ , he would say, and even though he wouldn’t have enough cause to smile, Oikawa would hear in the undercurrents of his words a brewing pleasure from being together. Falling asleep together, waking together, curled around each other like lost children one night and lonely men the next.

He can still feel the ache in his back. It twinges when he tries to push himself off without using too much of his legs, and his wrists creak a little when he finally makes it upright. A leg dangles off the edge of the king bed whilst he has the other tucked cozily underneath a thigh. It’s all bare. He’s all bare. And even his soul shivers from the gradual descent into an early winter’s morning.

That too, is bare.

As long as Hajime lies there beside him, his hands in an unwitting furl against something that has already disappeared, Tooru will bare himself to the world with his guardian next to him.

How his name was called and purred and breathed last night, giving Oikawa his own name as a gift, and even as he stares down at the solid profile of his sleeping lover to his left, he knows that any Tooru’s that aren’t borne from Hajime’s lips will have ceased to exist.

Those dreaming fingers are stretching, reaching for a handhold, and Oikawa has never realized how much strength it takes a man to hold himself back from lacing his fingertips against another’s. His eyes trace emptily up the expanse of skin that begs to be stroked, where his Hajime is spread against the white bedding without an inch of clothing to cover himself.

Tooru relives the kisses as best he can whilst his memory lasts. His eyelids flutter close and he brings a hand to trace the outline of his own lips as he recalls the way Hajime nipped at them, teasing them with his tongue and the way his fingernails bit into them as he held Tooru’s head down against his pillow.

He pulls back the way the blankets scratched, the way someone’s heavy footsteps sounded numbingly along the corridor outside, blind to a life’s last moments in a simple room beside him. Tooru will have to bear the rest of his years with this memory. Tooru will have to make do with his last time being loved so tenderly for the rest of his life.

It was a terrible thing to do, leaving before dawn. Getting up and dressed and slipping away like a spectre, as if Oikawa wasn’t capable of envisioning Hajime’s aching look the moment he woke, realizing that the other side of the bed had been long abandoned to the elements. He would be slouched in a taxi somewhere with a driver who cursed at his phone, the endless blinking of headlights blinding him against the cityscape which would sit otherwise serene in the unholy hours. He would pretend then that Hajime would suffer for him, grieve for him in the privacy of that rented room. That Hajime would glance around the carpet, seeing everything that was Tooru’s cleaned up and whisked away, and feel the pang of regret and bitterness so deep in his heart that he would never take another breath without it stinging.

That was what Tooru, in his endless naivete would imagine.

Oikawa knew better.

Oikawa was the one who had to listen with a face like stone when Hajime—always Hajime, never Iwaizumi—had called him for the first time in weeks like there was nothing wrong.  _ Hey _ , he had been greeted with, and all Oikawa could do was to press the receiver to his ear like a mute with no reply.

Oikawa had been the one to suggest the hotel room, pointlessly luxurious with a jacuzzi and a mini-refrigerator filled with things that they’d never bother to touch. Anything to keep it from disappearing all at once in a plume of smoke. He didn’t want to have his heart broken in a coffee shop, where everyone tossed away their empty cups into bins that seemed to swallow their traces in the gaping void.

The man he had fallen in love with and will continue to fall in love with every day, for the rest of his life, preferred to keep his messages concise. Preferred to contain his heart and his feelings into a little tunnel that would shimmer with light at the end of it when its bloated walls were directed at something that shone. Tooru used to be that light; he would lounge against a sofa and would bathe in how much he was loved, how much he loved, and how much Hajime would stare at him involuntarily like he was a spirit that danced in all his favourite colours around an evergreen flame.

His feet no longer remember the steps to those dances. Hajime had stopped asking for them long ago, and alone and still on his side of the bed, Oikawa has never felt so beautiful and so very meaningless in his life. No fingers would trace the muscles down his back, no mouth would press its hot puffs of breath against his spine. Oikawa has been alone for much longer than he had spent the evening with another man. It simply takes some time for him to feel the wounds in his chest.

In the darkened glass of the dull television, Oikawa catches sight of himself against his will and marvels at how he seems so frail with all those shadows dusting his edges. His hair is airy and auburn; even his bedhead is endearing, a slumbering cupid awaiting his love when his eyes finally open underneath the lamplight. It curls up in all directions, against the pale column of his neck, and waits for someone who has forfeited the chance again to reach out and curl it around his finger.

_ You look ridiculous _ , Hajime used to say, but Tooru would never believe him for a moment with such a heady body pressing against him. All those silly lies Hajime spoke in whenever he was in a mood were always sweet to hear, because lying was something Oikawa did, and to hear it from a man who had truth in his bones felt like a brand. Like how lying could become a habit, Tooru was prepared to become Hajime’s habit. Something he would find himself unconsciously reaching for and wondering about even when he has long forgotten the man behind the name.

With all his long, endless limbs and wiry strength, Oikawa touches his feet to the ground. The sudden steal of warmth worries him enough that his gasp would be heard, but Hajime sleeps on, oblivious. He picks up his trousers off the floor, shakes it free of tangles, and slides them on. He tosses his briefs away in the lidless dust bin. His shirt he leaves unbuttoned, tucked into his slacks, and for a guilty moment he traces the bites dotting his torso with a longing finger.

When life decides to be unfair, even those who love each other more than life itself can watch as their monuments crumble around them.

Sometimes, lovers break up.

That frightens Oikawa more than anything he has ever known, even as he gathers up his courage and picks up all the little memories of himself from the ground and tucks them back onto his body where they belonged. Hajime doesn’t want them anymore. Hajime doesn’t need them anymore.

It isn’t that Oikawa has never lived without Hajime’s love. He isn’t afraid of losing something he’s always known, always had. He knows exactly what it was like—what it  _ is _ like—to live without that love, and he isn’t sure that he can walk through that door back into that reality; to feel his face morph as the emptiness changes him.

But his eyes follow the way Hajime’s chest shifts, his feet tucked behind each other and the curve of his spine facing the closed balcony windows and knows that this love isn’t enough. Their love isn’t enough. Neither of them wants to give it enough time and enough chances to sour, to be brutalized beyond recognition without even nostalgia to hold them through.

Oikawa doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to do, and neither does Hajime. He admitted so himself last evening, when they were wrapped into each other, shifting to and fro against the sheets as Oikawa tried to moan without letting himself burst into tears. They should have fucked last night, but they had made a mistake, and ended up making love.

Hajime’s skin was too dark for Oikawa’s efforts to mark it. The only bruises that stand out are the difficult ones from volleyball, and Oikawa wonders how a ball bouncing off the gymnasium floor can be more ingrained into his love’s being than a man who would die for him.

But then again, he’s never had to make that choice. He’s collecting himself in a sleeping room with only his broken breathing in his ears, and he knows that he’s not making that choice now either.

It’s cold, and the wind that seeps from underneath the window cracks catches Oikawa’s open collar and chills his throat. He wishes for a brief moment that he was back underneath those covers and ensconced by another’s beating heart. He locates his watch on the bedside table and slides it on.

Although he’s the one leaving first, the one who can’t bear the future staring him in the face and hovering over his every movement, Oikawa feels like he’s the one being left behind with each step further he takes. Hajime lies unmoving on the bed that had held them so effortlessly the night before and seems to shed his own burdens with the wistful sounds he makes in his dreams. Oikawa has to ask himself if he’s the only one feeling like he’s being harvested alive whilst Hajime, his beautiful, headstrong Hajime, keeps breathing like one simply has to remember to.

_ Wake up _ , he wants to say. Louder and louder until Hajime startles awake from his honeyed dreams and sees Tooru’s shattered stare, with only enough willpower to hold himself together long enough to call a cab.

_ Wake up. Look at me. Turn back, just once. Give me one more laugh. Love me one more time. And another, until you tell me that you’ve had it all wrong. Tell me to stay. _

_ Tell me you need me, even if we’ll hate each other for it. _

Hajime doesn’t stir. When Oikawa takes a step outside, he glances back only once at his sleeping soul. He turns on his heels and closes the door swiftly behind him, afraid that the yellow light in the corridor might disturb the dreaming man within.


End file.
